About
I lead a frontend engineering team making the Google search results page easier to navigate. Previously Google Cloud and Firebase serverless infrastructure, HP Labs, Cadence, and Bell Labs.
All opinions are my own.
I’m also on Twitter, GitHub, and LinkedIn.
Blog Posts
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Here's the thing that has ended the code-formatting wars.
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Spaced Repetition Algorithm for a Flashcard App
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Adding Swipe Animation
In a follow-up to the last article which described Adding swipe actions to a web site, I’ll show how to add simple animation to give some user feedback that the swipe has happened.
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Adding swipe actions to a web site.
If you are reading this article on a phone or other touch device, did you know you can swipe left and right to get to other articles? Go on, try it now. I’ll wait.
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Why do Americans drink so much water?
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Porting blog to Jekyll
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Everyone in Earth could fit into NYC
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Pseudo-Boolean Functions
Not sure why it deserves a condescending name, but a pseudo-Boolean function is a function that takes Boolean parameters and returns a real number.
— Eamonn O'Brien-Strain 👨💻🔍🌁🇮🇪🇪🇺🇺🇲🇺🇳⚛️ (@eob) August 10, 2019
By comparison an honest-to-goodness Boolean function, worthy of great respect, takes Boolean parameters and returns a Boolean. -
soft launch, dark launch... what do others use?
"Push" releases behind flags.
— Eamonn O'Brien-Strain 👨💻🔍🌁🇮🇪🇪🇺🇺🇲🇺🇳⚛️ (@eob) July 7, 2019
Run "live traffic experiments" by enabling flags for small numbers of user.
"Launch" by ramping up flag enablement to all users.
"Soft launch" without fanfare.
"Dark launch" by starting traffic flow through infra, but not (yet) to users. -
Encrypted DNS
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Learning from Successful Democracy
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The Inverse Square Law of Bias
Consider a typical tech workplace where there are four men for every woman.⁽¹⁾ Assume that women and men both exhibit bias to members of other genders at the same rate. Then women will experience gender bias at a rate of sixteen times more than men.
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Experimenting with horizontal navigation
[See old version of this post to see what is being described.]
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Simplest possible web templating?
[See old version of this post to see what is being described.]
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How to self-host a blog
One of the purposes of this blog is to experiment with simple ways put up a blog on the web without depending on any blogging platform. For this I wanted a free way to deploy static web pages on my own domain name. For this I chose Firebase Hosting, partly because I am very familiar with it, having worked on the Firebase team and personally knowing many of the Hosting development team, but also because it is actually the best solution I know of for what I want, and it is free for sites that have the traffic of typical personal sites.
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From Cloud to Search
I'm moving to the engineering team responsible for the main Google Search user interface!
— Eamonn O'Brien-Strain 👨💻🔍🌁🇮🇪🇪🇺🇺🇲🇺🇳⚛️ (@eob) August 19, 2018
Sad to be leaving my amazing colleagues in Cloud and Firebase, but so excited to be learning new tech and working on a product that has transformed the world and touches billions of people. -
Will the technocratic elites suffer the same fate as 18c aristocrats and 19c capitalists?
“History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” Around the turn of the 19th Century: the French Revolution and the American Revolution, together with the Industrial Revolutions killed off the ancien régimes with their aristocrats and divine right of kings.
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What’s Wrong With HP?
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Trimming the Empty Parts From The World Map
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The Dance of the Two Cultures
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Go As A Functional Programming Language
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Privacy from Corporations is Privacy from the Government
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Why don't I wear green on St. Patrick's day?
[Originally posted a version of this on Facebook on St. Patrick’s Day, 2013]
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Monitoring Disk Usage Of Ec2 Instances
Amazon AWS has some great monitoring tools for your cloud instances and other parts of your AWS cloud infrastructure. However one notable missing out-of-the box feature is the ability to monitor disk usage of your instances, something crucial for reliable large-scale deployment.
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Transit Of Venus
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Useful Details Of Author's Experience Getting Headless Firefox To Create Pdf From Html
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Jumping Through Hoops To Git Clone Githup Repos In The Enterprise
How to use the git protocol through a HTTP CONNECT proxy – Thoughts on Systems
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Welcome To The Latest Incarnation Of My Blog
This is now a beta location new location for my blog. Once I sort out some remaining formatting issues on so of the old articles on the new location, I am going to retire the old location.
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Ingenious Algorithms
(7) What are some of the most ingenious algorithms in computer science? – Quora
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Free Classification Service
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Building A Web App With Node And Geddy
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JavaScript code to make your website comply with the new EU Cookie Law
JavaScript code to make your website comply with the new EU Cookie Law.
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Simple, clean pure-CSS tooltips
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Feeling Like JQuery Is Too Bloated?
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Coffeescript classes: Coffeescript-style or Crockford-style?
Here are two different ways of defining a class in Coffeescript:
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Generalized continuous compiling (like sbt or coffeescript)
One of the really nice things about the sbt build system (for building Scala projects) or the coffeescript compiler is that they have a “watch” mode.
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Day after Occupy protest: Bank Modification
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Don't confuse Users with Customers
If your users are also your customers, then you are lucky. It makes a lot of design and marketing decisions a lot simpler. You can focus laser-like on providing features that your users are willing to pay for.
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REST, noSQL, Capability Security, and a Unified Document-Creation Data Model
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Social Photo Sharing Sessions at SXSW
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Minimalism is good: programming lessons from music and writing
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What levels of radiation you should worry about
There has been a lot of irresponsible reporting of the possible dangers from the damaged Japanese nuclear reactors. Even the New York Times was guilty of providing an interactive presentation that gave a misleading impression that the U.S. West Coast was in danger.
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This is a nice solution for creating live HTML pages by "welding" JSON data onto HTML prototypes.
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RDF Schema Diagrams
For some reason the latest (2004) version of the RDF Schema specification does not include the useful diagrams that were included in previous drafts. Maybe they were omitted because the diagrams sacrificed some formalism for the sake of clarity. Nevertheless I found those older diagrams useful for getting my head around some of the concepts, so here they are:
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HP Labs seeking an agile Java contract web programmer to Do Amazing
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Now you can convert any text to Ogham
In a little bit of recreational programming I threw together a web converter that takes any text and converts it into Ogham.
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WebOS shortcut "bullseye" means hold gesture area until gesture light glows.
Finally! Thanks to this Palm Pre Shortcuts article I now understand the “keyboard shortcuts” that show in the Edit menu of every WebOS app. They show a bullseye symbol followed by, for example “ C” for copy and “ V” for paste. But I never understood what the bullseye symbol meant. It looked a bit like the onscreen cursor hint that shows when you are in “shift” mode or “orange” (actually white on my phone) mode. But that never worked, and it turns out that the bullseye seem instead to be an attempt to show a glowing gesture area light. You need to hold the gesture area till you get the light and then press the specified key.
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Checked Exceptions Considered Evil
Many years ago when I first learned Java, I really liked the “checked exception” programming language feature. If the code in a method can throw a checked exception then the compiler forces the programmer to either surround the code with a
try-catchor include the exception in thethrowsclause of the function declaration (which will recursively cause this compiler do this check in the calling code). Like strong typing, it seemed like a great way for the compiler to help the programmer writing more robust code with fewer error-handling problems. -
Hudson and Play – how to configure Hudson for continuous integration of Play Framework Web Applications
The Play Framework is a very nice rapid-development environment for building Java web applications. It brings many of the sensibilities of Ruby on Rails to Java web development, including a nice test framework that allows for test-driven design. However, when you use Play you need to use its own particular build system using command-line commands such as “play run” and “play test”, and not more standard Java build systems like Ant or Maven.
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Well Beings Veterinary Homeopathy
I just discovered that in my neighborhood is a business called Well Beings Veterinary Homeopathy. People in the city do treat their pets like people, and belief in homeopathy is consistent with stereotypes of Californians, but what really tickled me was to see the “well” prefix (usually as in “well-woman” or “well-baby”) added to the somewhat Buddhist use of the word “being”. This name sounds like a parody created by someone mocking San Francisco.
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Challenging "Challenging Dogma"
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Announcing 0.5 Release of Nrby Photos, a Palm WebOS App to Display Nearby Photographs
Thanks again to the beta testers who have helped shape the features in this release.
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Announcing 0.4 Release of Nrby Photos, a Palm WebOS App to Display Nearby Photographs
Thanks again to the beta testers who have helped shape the features in this release.
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New Beta 0.3 Release of Nrby Photos, A Palm WebOS App to Display Nearby Photographs
Thanks to all the beta testers of the 0.2 release for your testing and reviews.
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Nrby Photos -- A Palm WebOS App to Display Nearby Photographs
Displays photographs that people on the Flickr have taken close to your current location. Flick left and right to browse through the photographs. Automatically updates as you move. (All photographs are copyright of their owners.)
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A different view of St Patrick
The meme of Christianity was in decline on the Western fringe of Europe as the Germanic tribes of the Angles and Saxons and Franks swept aside the lingering Celtic-Roman society left behind by the Roman Empire. But, some carriers of the meme, personified in legend as St Patrick, made it to Ireland where it proved stronger than the pre-existing polytheistic Druidism, and from its Atlantic fastness it ultimately spread back East and Christianized the invading Germanics. I celebrate this today not so much because of the Christianity but because of the technology of Writing that accompanied it, setting Ireland on a literary course that ultimately lead to Yeats and Joyce and Becket and Heaney. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
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Don’t read this if you plan to listen to the Pimsleur Mandarin audio course!
I like the Pimsleur courses a lot. They allow you to get to a very basic speaking level in a language very quickly.
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Decluttered API documentation for the iText PDF-manipulating Java library
The iText library is a great resource for generating and manipulating PDF files. However its API is very complex and there is a notable lack of good online tutorial material. So you often must resort to plowing through the Javadoc-generated API documentation trying to figure out how to use the library.
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Debunking Airnergy with some back-of-the-envelope calculations
I have seen several reverences to Airnergy device by RCA that claims to recharge a battery by harvesting WiFi signals from the air.
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50 Most Frequently Used Chinese Characters Presented in an Easy-to-Learn Way
I created this list of Chinese characters for my own benefit in trying to learn them. I took Jun Da’s list of most frequently used characters and added a Google image search to provide some mnemonics. I added tone-color and exaggerated tone marks to the pinyin to help remind me of the the tones.
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Add a button to your browser to translate selected Chinese characters from a web page
You can now use Google to do some pretty readable translation of Chinese-language web sites.
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See real example results of website optimization A/B tests
One of the big advantages of creating Web products is that effectiveness can be immediately measured. One lucrative example of this is click-through web advertising.
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Learning from Graphic Designers -- Grids as Scaffolding for Automatic Layout
A presentation I gave yesterday at the “Imaging and Printing in a Web 2.0 World” conference (part of the broader Electronic Imaging Conference) in San Jose:
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How you might create a Scala matrix library in a functional programming style
Sure you can program in Scala just like you would in Java and get all the advantages of the cleaner syntax. But if you really want to explore the power of Scala you should try some functional programming.
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How you might create a Scala matrix library in a functional programming style
Sure you can program in Scala just like you would in Java and get all the advantages of the cleaner syntax. But if you really want to explore the power of Scala you should try some functional programming.
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Scala tip: Making it easier to add attributes to an XML element
In most respects Scala makes it very easy to handle XML, but there are a few things that are hard to do. One is changing the value of an existing attribute on an element, or adding a new attribute to an element.
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Scala Class, an online resource to make it easier to learn the Next Big Language
I believe that Scala is poised to take off as the successor to Java as the main programming language for programming on the Java virtual machine. However, I have found the online resources for learning the language to be a bit weaker than for some other programming languages, so I set up scalaclass.com where I gather together material to get you started and support your continued development in this interesting new language. The site is still in embryonic form, but I welcome your initial comments.
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An idiom for cleaner pimping of libraries in Scala
In dynamic languages like JavaScript and Ruby you can modify existing classes, including system classes, with extra methods. This can be a very handy, if dangerous, technique.
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Sproutcore, a Rails-like approach to client-side web programming
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How a Scala script can specify what JARs should be added to its CLASSPATH
The reason the Scala programming language has such a name is that it is meant to be scalable, i.e. good for both small scripts and large software systems. I am already convinced that Scala is as good, if not better than Java for the large-scale development, but what about the small scale?
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Tackling Chinese
I have the misfortune of being both very interested in languages and very bad at learning them.
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The Reality behind the Hype of Wolfram Alpha
After been given advance hands-on access to Wolfram Alpha, I did some testing and my conclusions about the current state of this tool are:
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The Mystery of Wolfram Alpha
So far, there have been two main approaches to the problem of organizing the world’s information: (1) throw machine-learning techniques at vast quantities of unstructured information, as Google does or (2) create complex networks of interrelated ontologies and apply inference techniques, as the Semantic Web community does.
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Avoid the rational and secularist when selling your innovative product or service?
While scanning through the The IIIP Innovation Confidence Index 2008 Report published today by the The Institute for Innovation & Information Productivity I noticed one surprising finding that is illustrated in Figure 6 of the report.
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The Illusion of Color
One thing that confused me when I learned science in high school was the connection between the spectrum of colors as seen in a rainbow, and the three primary colors. In case anyone else is confused here is my simple explanation.
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33% reduction in public order prisoners in 2002
Did the aftermath of 9/11 attacks result in fewer people being imprisoned for public order offenses?
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What questions should a product requirements document answer?
I am temporarily putting on a marketing hat and creating a product requirement document (PRD). My first step was to create a template based on a skeleton in a Wikipedia article, together with some valuable details from my colleague Chris. I attempted to make it a bit more “agile” by using “user stories” instead of “features” for the functional specification.
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Spash! -- Iceberg calving off glacier.
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The inherent unpredictibility of the future
I am three quarters way through reading Teleb’s “The Black Swan”. What an interesting book! I knew from the reviews about the main thesis that history is dominated by unexpected high-impact events, which we later rationalize as fitting into some post hoc theory. However, there is also a lot of very interesting philosophical background that sent me off to Wikipedia to read more about “empiricism” versus “historicity”. Teleb’s writing style is very informal, more like an after-dinner speech than a monograph – some might find it a little precious, but I found it quite amusing.
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Where the freeway tentacles have withdrawn from San Francisco
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Rediscovering Audio Signal Processing
This Holiday Season our household acquired a tape deck with a USB connection. (Thanks B & J!) Now, finally we can convert some of our hundreds of old cassette tapes to MP3s.
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Sparks Fly at Web 2.0 Panel
Well I could not go to the Web 2.0 Summit but, thanks to my Irish connections, I did get to attend one interesting event on the periphery, a panel discussion called “Web 2.0 in Action”.
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7 automatic improvements to your photos -- for free
Jamie Beckett at HP Labs has a blog entry on one of the Snapfish Lab tools which automatically applies seven proprietary enhancement algorithms to improve your photograph. See Jamie’s article for more information.
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Snapfish Lab on HP Labs Front Page
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Google Trends for Online Photo Printing Sites
This Google Trends graph comparing photo printing sites is interesting. The seasonal Christmas surge is very evident. It also looks as if by this measure that Snapfish has caught up with and pulled ahead of both Kodak and Shutterfly.
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Me talking about Snapfish Lab
Here is a thirty-second extract of the video in the previous post, showing me talking about Snapfish Lab.
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Artículo en Noticias
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HP LABS -- New Products in the Works at HP LABS
This video was on the front page of siliconvalley.com, the web presence of the San Jose Mercury news. It features several HP Labs projects including Book Prep, Face Bubbles, Snapfish Lab, and Conversa.
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Finally got laptop usable again -- with Ubuntu Linux in VMware under Windows
After my disk failure, my re-born laptop is more-or-less fully functional again. Previously I used dual boot setup. This time I used the free VMware Server to run Linux under Windows. So far it works well: I can do almost all my work in Linux, escaping out to Windows just to use the Outlook calendar and set up the VPN – and view the occasional IE-only web page. The biggest improvement now is that Linux networking can piggy-back on the Windows VPN so I can access the corporate intranet from home under Linux.
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Day Five Without Windows
Day 4 since Windows died on my dual-booted laptop. Can do almost everything on Linux. But no Outlook calendar or VPN, so need to reins ...
— Eamonn O'Brien-Strain 👨💻🔍🌁🇮🇪🇪🇺🇺🇲🇺🇳⚛️ (@eob) March 13, 2008 -
Big HP Labs Event Today
We had a big event in HP Labs today unveiling our new research strategy. My small part was helping to demo our Snapfish Lab web site. We also released a video about Snapfish Lab in which I make an appearance.
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Architectural Principles -- Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Here is one of the introductory slides I gave in a recent project proposal presentation.
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The U.S. Presidential Candidate Dating Game
I’m not a U.S. citizen, but I live here and find the presidential race fascinating. So I took some of the online tests which claim to tell me which candidates are a closest match to my opinions.
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Sneak Peek at Snapfish Lab
We’re still not quite ready for full public release, but as a special treat, here is an invitation code for readers of this blog:
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Snapfish Lab
For the last few months, I have been part of the team creating Snapfish Lab, a web site that allows users of the HP’s Snapfish photo site to try out some of the new technology coming out of HP Labs.
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Plant Hardiness Zone Changes -- More Evidence of Global Warming?
I happened to come across an Arbor Day Foundation page that shows how plant hardiness zones have migrated north between 1990 and 2004. This seems like another piece of evidence pointing towards the reality of global warming.
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Technorati Profile
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No good transit option between middle of San Francisco and Palo Alto foothills
I started creating a spreadsheet of transit schedules between my home in San Francisco and my office in Palo Alto. It looks like there is no appealing options, but I will try it next week anyway.
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Mounting windows disks under Linux
I followed these instructions for how to mount a FAT partition read-write for communication between Windows and Linux on my laptop. I also followed the instructions further down to mount the main windows NTFS partition read-only.
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Ubuntu as a replacement for Windows?
With Ubuntu it seems that Linux is getting closer to be a viable replacement for Windows. I am several days into my experiment of running Ubuntu as my operating system on my laptop. So far it is going fairly well, but I have hit the following problems:
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FixVideoResolutionHowto - Community Ubuntu Documentation
One problem with my Ubunto installation on my laptop is that the max resolution I can set was 1024x768 which is pretty crowded for doing software development in Eclipse. So I followed the instructions in FixVideoResolutionHowto - Community Ubuntu Documentation:
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Eclipse downloads home
Next I went to the Eclipse downloads home to get the next vital piece of Java development kit. I just extracted the Linux archive file into a subdirectory of my home directory, navigated into that folder and executed it. It started up right away using the 1.4.2 GCJ Java SDK that comes with Ubuntu.
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Java SE Downloads
I had to go to Sun’s Java SE Downloads web site to download Java, which is not available via the Ubuntu installer. I considered using one of the open source Java SDKs intead but I make extensive use of Java 1.5 features which are not yet I think well supported by non-Sun compilers.
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Setting up laptop for dual booting
Well, I just received a new laptop at work and our IT department put their standard Windows XP image onto it. I decided I wanted to be able to also run Linux on this machine.
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WP-Cache and the Blank Page problem at Blogging Blog
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Draft of brochure for Enchanted Hills house
Well, we now have a draft of the brochure offering our house for sale.
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Our house is going on the market soon
Our house will be going on the market just after Labor Day.
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Police Sting
San Francisco’s Finest are making sure drivers stop for pedestrians.technorati tags:San Francisco
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Guerrilla Urban Micro Park
You too can unfurl some turf and create a suprisingly congenial small park in an urban parking space.
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Photo-Illustrated Tree of Life (Flickr/TOL Mash-Up)
I have created a depiction of the evolutionary tree of life on Earth that is a simple mash-up of Flickr and the Tree of Life web project. It displays photos that have been taxonomically tagged.
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Blood sacrifice, the left and the 1916 insurrection in Ireland - Ireland / Britain History
This anarchist analysis of the 1916 rising and the Irish War of Independence has some interesting points of view that I had not heard before. The author claims for example that the reason that the British agreed to come to terms with Sinn Fein is that they were terrified of much more radical left-wing movements in Ireland and Britain.
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Google Trends: irish
This is the Google Trends graph for the search term “irish”. Note the big peak every year on St. Patrick’s day.
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In Memory of David
In memory of a friend, David, who died of cancer last year at a tragic young age I am helping to raise money for the Cancer Society. If you can, please donate.
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San Francisco Airport
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Using Film-Making Techniques to Synthesize Compelling Video Shows from Consumer Photographs
This is what I worked on last year.
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Visited States
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War, "The Price of Freedom"?
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Writely Update
I was wrong, writely does support hyperlinks and spell checking (as demonstrated by this posting), and they responded to my feedback very quickly. So it really is a very nice tool for writing blog posts. My experience as a very small sample usability test indicates perhaps that the UI design and help text should be tweaked a little to make the available features more obvious.
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Writely
Writely
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OK/Cancel � Comic
As a software developer I found the OK/Cancel � Comics a really fun and informative insight into the point of view of a user experience designer.
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Common REST Mistakes
Nice guidelines to REST in Common REST Mistakes. I particularly liked the closing summary:
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Human Universals
I first saw Donald Brown’s list of human universals as an appendix to Pinker’s “Blank Slate”. It is quite a stunning list of things that seem to be common to all humanity, including things you might have thought were unique to your particular culture. Thanks to Jack Fenner for putting up this slightly modified version of Brown’s list.
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Engineers need to understand how the mind works
I like this point of view of Pinker (From Edge 3):
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Maybe available to help your project
You might want to have a look at my resume if you are in the San Francisco area and looking for a senior technologist with a lot of programming and research experience.
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How to capture video
It looks like Capture Guide will be a good resource for me as I try to figure out the best way to capture broadcast video to disk.
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Free background music loops.
Great. I just found this source for music loops that I can use as background for my synthesized video.
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Comparison of different SQL implementations
Comparison of different SQL implementations is a useful reference.
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Private Members in JavaScript
Thanks to the E-Language mailing list for pointing me to this example of why JavaScript is a much more interesting language than you might think.
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Cúirt an Ṽean-Oík̃e
(Caiỹdean) (Nua)
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A New Irish Language Spelling System
One of the nice things about the Irish language is that its spelling is very regular. However for non-Irish speakers some of the pronunciation rules can be confusing.
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Taking Plato Out Of Software
Object-oriented methods are considered the best way to build large, maintainable software systems. Languages such as C++, Java, and Python now dominate in many areas, and the conventional wisdom encourages us to do analysis and design in an object-oriented manner.
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A Tedious Explanation of the f/stop
I have learned and forgotten what f/stop means several times in my life. A Tedious Explanation of the f/stop, which is not at all tedious, explains it nicely. Maybe now I won’t forget.
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Kid Language Reference
I really like Kid – an elegant pythonic templating language.
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Python Is Not Java
As a long-time Java programmer who occasionally writes in Python I found this useful. Python Is Not Java warns you what Java idioms do not translate well into Python, and explains how to write more pyhonically.
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Amazingly good dinner at Bayonna
Quail salad, rabbit, lamb. At base, Southern, but done in a wonderful California way. The best meal we had in New Orleans.
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Notes while visiting the Ogden Museam of Southern Art
George dureau, male figures, satyrs
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Loft 523 Design
Agape Spoon tub. Modern fan co. Vola bathroom accessories. Fortuny lamp.
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Dramatic events in the middle of the night
A blaring alarm roused us, hearts a pounding, from a deep sleep at 2am. As soon as we realized that it must be the fire alarm we hurriedly threw on clothes and headed down the emergency stairs and joined the other guests in the lobby.
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Wonderful meal in Fins
Wine: La crema, Anderson Valley, 2001
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Daytime in le Vieux Carre
Back in our funky hotel room resting our tired feet after spending the day in the French Quarter. After a lovely brunch we wandered around listening to street musicians and exploring and exploring art galleries.
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Brunch at Begue's.
Yummy. Great buffet with lots of variety.
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Arrived in New Orleans
Arrived in New Orleans yesterday for a short vacation before spending Thanksgiving in Texas.
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Film Analysis
Yale’s Film Analysis site is a great reference for understanding how films are made, along with lots of illustrative stills and some clips.
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C# Tutorial
It looks like it would be convenient to write some Windows device-access code in C#. This C# Tutorial looks like a good quick start.
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Nerves are racked
Man, it’s nerve racking! electoral-vote.com is showing Kerry ahead by a single electoral vote. Meta-Analysis of State Polls - election.princeon.edu with somewhat more sophisticated statistical methods is predicting Kerry 311/Bush 227. The Iowa electronic market which had shown Bush ahead for the last few months is now closing towards dead even.
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A handy cheat-sheet for election night
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ehcache
We buillt a cache like ehcache for a previous project. Next time I think I will try using ehcache instead.
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Let's see how well the Iowa futures market predicts the election.
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Mount St. Helens VolcanoCam
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How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper
I came across this useful set of advice for writers of computer science systems papers. This is very very pertinent right now as I am in the early stages of writing such a paper.
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2004 Electoral Vote Animation
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new OpenGL-based pipeline for Java 2D
According to the rhw Java Buzz Forum there is a binding to OpenGL in Java 1.5 enabled by adding the VM argument
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Two-Terabyte Memory Card Coming to Production : Technology : MobileMag
Thanks to S. “Tetherless” Keshav, who gave a talk here today in HP Labs, for giving me a pointer to this promised Two-Terabyte Memory Card. This could change some of the trade-offs in designing distributed systems over unreliable, intermittent networks.
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In Defense of PowerPoint
From Computer Magazine - In Defense of PowerPoint comes an interesting approach to giving conference presentations:
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Spatial Orientation of Desktops
John Siracusa has an written an excellent article on what, in his opinion, makes a good desktop shell, concentrating mostly on the Macintosh finder.
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How to read Smalltalk if you are a Java or C++ programmer.
My programming language trajectory has been BASIC -> FORTRAN -> Pascal -> C -> C++ -> Java with a few diversions such as Perl and Python. On the way I have become a firm convert to object-oriented programming, and as such I always found my lack of knowledge in Smalltalk was a big gap.
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Some nice looking Java software
GeoSoft - Geotechnical Software Services has some nice looking GPLed Java software.
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Non-linear Dimensionality Reduction Techniques for Unsupervised Feature Extraction
Non-linear Dimensionality Reduction Techniques for Unsupervised Feature Extraction
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Charles Stewart's congressional data page
Lots of raw data of congressional roll call votes on Charles Stewart’s congressional data page. I’ve got some ideas of some data mining I want to try out on this data.
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Mathematica Eye Candy
[http://obrain.com/~eob/blogPics/historySpace2.gif] I have been working on a little project that involves data mining some personal history. One of the things I have been trying is using principal component analysis to reduce the dimensionality of my data to something I can get an intuitive feel for, so that I can try to ficure out what are the best automated methods for pattern recognition. This image is an example reduced from sixteen variables to three. It’s impressive what you can do in Mathematica.
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Applet Demos of Wolfram Cellular Automota
Rudy Rucker and his class have done a good job of providing applet versions of some of the cellular automota from Stephen Wolfram’s amazing book book “A New Kind of Science”.
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SDForum
Some interesting technical events sponsored by the SDForum.
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Clustering Algorithms and Dimensional Reduction
I am giving my self a crash course on some data mining techniques for a project I am working on. Here are some things I found useful.
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Whale watching
Just back from an amazing whale-watching boat trip on the straits between San Juan Island, Washington State and Vancouver Island, British Columbia. We were lucky in that all of the local pods of Orca had come together to socialize and hunt for the salmon sheltering from the strong ebb tide currents in coves along the coast. We saw lots of the orca swimming along in family groups, splashing about as they herded the salmon, and popping their heads out of the water to keep an eye on the boats.
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Reconstructing grammars from sequences
Interesting. I think I might be able to use this in my “personal data mining” experiments.
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Memory footprint of Java Objects.
A C/C++ programmer, used to using
sizeof, might be suprised how hard it is to figure out the memory footprint of Java object. Of course relying on memory sizes is very bad for portability, but sometimes when tuning applications you do need this information. -
Glimpses of the surface of titan.
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Got a gmail account a few days ago
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Control Room
Last night we saw the film “Control Room”, a behind-the scenes documentary of Al Jazeera covering the initial invasion of Iraq.
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Peering at Phoebe
From JPL:
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New home for my blog.
Well, the upgrade of my obrain.com home server from an ancient version of Redhat Linux to the latest stable version of Debian Linux had mixed result. After struggling with a somewhat confusing installations process I eventually succeeded in getting things up and running, but in the process I lost my old entries for the Movable Type blog I was hosting. So here I am re-starting the blog again, but this time hosted on blogger’s own servers. Hopefully I can trust Google with my data more that I can trust myself.
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Citizens keep an eye on government.
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Fossil Sites in California
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J2ME Profiles
Personal Basis Profile vs. Personal Profile: What’s the Difference?
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Quantitative data on distributed computing economics.
Some interesting quantitative data from Jim Gray’s Distributed Computing Economics:
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Satellite Image of the Big Blackout
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Space-based programming (blackboard communication) on top of JMS
Using Space-Based Programming For Loosely Coupled Distributed Systems”
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Space-Based Programming
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MIT initiative on technology and self
I am currently listening to a Cambridge Forum speech by Sherry Turkle on our local public radio station. She is the director of the MIT initiative on technology and self.
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Trinity College Prof In Our Space
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Scalable, Structured Data Placement over
Scalable, Structured Data Placement over P2P Storage Utilities
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Yanbin Ben Zhao
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Messing around with Java byte code at runtime.
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New JDK 1.4 socket timeout control
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Moonbeam XML Socket Server